The beginning of the end of Facebook’s traffic engine? | Hacker News Reader

The beginning of the end of Facebook’s traffic engine?

niemanlab.org

80 pointsluu31 comments

I'm guessing that their move in 2015 to put the kibosh on organizations using their Facebook account to self-promote will have a larger impact on this sort of thing.

http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/11/news-feed-fyi-reducing-o...

They say it's in the name of reducing spam on your news feed, but something tells me that it's just a ruse to route that type of behavior to paid advertisements and to end the free ride for small businesses.

FB is pretty solid with ads these days. I'm seeing blocks of sponsored stuff every 3-7 posts. Considering how many non-sponsored posts aren't really interesting to me, and how many repeats I see, they basically have me checking in constantly by dangling the possibility of new, relevant stuff behind that darn red world icon. It's a bit scary to think that I view this as an important communication tool and it's so riddled with ads, but I also understand we don't exactly live in utopia. Some friends just can't easily be reached in other ways.

>They say it's in the name of reducing spam on your news feed, but something tells me that it's just a ruse to route that type of behavior to paid advertisements and to end the free ride for small businesses.

I hear this a lot from small businesses....but really, I'm not interested in most things posted by pages I "like".

Facebook does a pretty good job of gauging my interest. I'm very interested in 2-3 pages I liked, and Facebook shows me all of their stuff, usually at the top of my feed.

Other stuff is sporadic, usually just the most popular of that pages posts. The rest is stuff from my friends.

Why should it be different? It's not like I have the attention to see every post from pages I've liked.

Presumably the (external) sites you liked you have also. I sites from your Facebook feed after liking them, hence increasing their weight. As such I guess the answer for small businesses is simple - you need an engaged audience and then Facebook is another way to reach that engaged audience.

Thinking if Facebook as an advertising medium is IMO wrong - it's like an email list to people who don't check their email.

Of course the problem is now how do you reach potential members of your audience before they become engaged?

I think part of the problem is the meaning of 'like'. It conflates liking the 'thing' (band, store, café, etc.) with 'following' this thing. In some cases I'd love to follow a person or entity because I care about the updates, but in some cases I just want to 'like' something to show other people how unique I am (where 'I' is an younger version of myself).

So, nothing to back that claim. No data or announcement from Facebook. Just a remark about external web links being shit on mobile and that's it. Not even a decent argument there. It's like saying elephants will grow tall necks in 2005 because of some random reason.

Am I missing something here?

that was my thinking... if he calls it right, he can point back to this article. If he called it wrong, no one will probably remember this post.

Interestingly, it's part of a broader query posed to many journalist and neatly compiled here: http://www.niemanlab.org/collection/predictions-2015/

EVEN better, they follow a sane URL-naming scheme so last year's predictions were easy enough to find: http://www.niemanlab.org/collection/predictions-2014/

The author is a finance blogger at Reuters (http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/) and they asked for a 2015 prediction. You're right, I don't see anything to back up the prediction.

Maybe the author is hoping this article will go viral on Facebook? It certainly has a bit of a link-baity headline.

Felix Salmon is no longer at Reuters. The article itself and the link both show as much.

> Am I missing something here?

Yes. Facebook announced updates to their Newsfeed algorithm to reduce the amount of "promotional" content people see in their feeds.

https://www.facebook.com/business/news/update-to-facebook-ne...

But the article is talking about Facebook limiting non-promotional Web links. It might be a reasonable thing for Facebook to do, but it's not obvious that they will.

While I agree with the author's point that anyone who is not Facebook will be screwed, I disagree with this part: "Facebook has two natural constituencies: its advertisers and its users."

Facebook does have two constituencies: its advertisers and its shareholders. There has been very little improvement for users in the past few years. While the site has become filled with more and more advertising, users have less and less control over their newsfeed. After years of changing the setting, I don't even have the option to show posts by Most Recent any more.

Meanwhile, small businesses, who helped build up the Facebook brand are being forced to pay to reach their own fans. I hope this misalignment of incentives really bites them hard.

If you're referring to the mobile app (iOS), there is a way to change the setting to Most Recent posts; however, it is buried and difficult. You're right here, Facebook wants full control so they CAN put more ads on the users' news feed.

And this is one of the reasons why I uninstalled the android app and use the mobile website instead - it still offers the option to sort by most recent.

And doesn't try to trick you into installing Facebook Messenger. Recently got a mobile notification of a message from a Facebook contact, clicked on it naturally thinking it would take me either to the website, or the messages section in the Facebook app. Nope, it decided to start me on a wizard for setting up and installing Facebook Messenger, and proceeding to ask me to invite my other contacts to join as well.

No thank you.

>and which is probably suboptimal on mobile.

Why is content so often bad on mobile? I tried reading a page by Forbes today on my moto E, and it didn't even scroll right.

I'm guessing complex analytics has something to do with slow page load speed, but why is so much effort put into making an interface that degrades user experience compared to simply displaying the text with formatting? Web sites used to look fine, AND work.

I suspect I'm missing something and that this behavior helps sites somehow. But I'm at a loss to say how that is.

Well, true, there is no data to back it, so it's pure speculation. However, if your all business is based on an external service that you have no control on has that has no legal nor contractual obligation to you, then you should be ready to pivot quickly if and when they take that away from you. And you should plan to have the cushion to do so.

Am I the only one thinking this is not new? There are many articles about such trend with Facebook strategy. Companies either starting to pay up for ads or post more meaning posts to make it viral naturally. Anything bait-like or low quality like-me, like-this,... will be dead.

Next, a push for bigger mobile screens to make room for more ads.

(That's the biggest issue on mobile - where to put the ads. There's almost no way to have a non-annoying ad on mobile. This is a vulnerability of all ad-based mobile services.)

I can't wait until phone screens are as big as laptops and then some genius comes up with the idea to add a hardware keyboard. Then the circle will start again.

iPad Air 5 "even thinner with an attached keyboard that gets out of your way ~ we've boiled it down to the essence of what a tablet should be"

Then people will be holding laptops against their faces in the street.

There is no question mark on the title of the page itself, so why is there one here? And even if it was a question, it violates Betteridge's law of headlines [0] in that if it was a question, then the answer would have been no, but in this article Felix is arguing that will be the case.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Even Betteridge himself admits that his Law is not universally true.

I wonder how this will affect the web standards that are pushed by Facebook traffic, like Open Graph.

This seems to be the thing ones does annually, predict the death of facebook.

Did you read it? It predicts that Facebook will stop sending a firehose of traffic to outside websites. It says nothing about the death or popularity of Facebook itself.

facebook is by its own nature destined to fail and be replaced. The process has already started and it is a matter of time before it reaches a tipping point, everyone and his dog is predicting the demise of facebook because at some point it will happen and then they'll be able to say they said so.

I'm sorry... but was the incredibly visible avatar necessary for a "journalistic" piece? http://i.imgur.com/920RtbF.png

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